People say that being a mom is the toughest job in the world, and they are likely on to something. As one funny saying goes “being a mom is a full-time job, except with no paycheck, no sick days, no breaks, it’s 168 hours rather than 40, and you can’t quit.”
Of course, while being a mom is not without challenges, there are benefits to family life: in an open-ended survey question, Americans were most likely to say that children or grandchildren were the specific thing that made life meaningful and that spending time with family is the most important source of meaning in their life. But regardless of how meaningful family life can be, it is safe to say that parenting is also an enormous undertaking that requires a huge amount of tenacity and sacrifice.
Mothers absorb much of the necessary sacrifices: statistically, mothers still spend the most time caring for children and mothers are the most likely to make adjustments in their work lives to accommodate childrearing. Mothers also necessarily absorb the early physical and emotional burdens associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding.
Motherhood is grueling enough, and the contributions that mothers make are important enough, that it is especially frustrating when government policy makes the hard work that moms do even more difficult. Unfortunately, there are a wide variety of policies that make being a mom more challenging: some policies limit mothers’ ability to make choices for their children, others make being a parent more expensive, and still more make balancing work and home life harder.
Many moms take a great deal of care in making even the small choices for their kids: what should their kid wear to the first day at school, what should they eat for dinner, or what type of extracurriculars should their child be involved in this year. But the bigger choices like “where should we live so that my child can get a good education?” or big picture parenting questions like “how can I help my kid develop confidence and independence?” are arguably more stressful, especially when they are made in a system that limits or penalizes parents’ choices.
The current system seems designed to limit parents from making some of the most important choices, like where they live and where their children attend school. Together or individually, public school zoning and residential zoning create a finite set of options for American families living in many cities. This can be a huge source of stress and concern when families cannot afford to live within a high-performing school’s boundaries (Figure 1), or else cannot afford to live within a neighborhood that makes attending a high-performing school feasible. Sadly, families are regularly zoned out of the opportunities associated with amenity-rich neighborhoods and public schools.
Figure 1. School quality varies by home value across U.S. public elementary schools
Source: Vanessa Brown Calder, Zoned Out: How School and Residential Zoning Limit Educational Opportunity (Joint Economic Committee, 2019).
In addition to limiting educational and housing choices, existing policy second-guesses moms’ parenting choices. Raising a confident and independent child can be difficult, and it may seem especially difficult given that news outlets and popular shows highlight tragic but statistically rare accidents and crimes. But mothers working to raise confident children by encouraging independent behaviors like walking home on their own can run into complaints by busybody bystanders that turn formal, and parents have been reported for child neglect for allowing their children to take a walk around their neighborhood or play outside without supervision.
In 2020, there were a whopping 2.1 million ultimately unsubstantiated investigations into child maltreatment in the U.S.[i] Even though the majority of reports of child neglect or abuse are unsubstantiated, the threat of complaint or reporting can be enough to chill age-appropriate parenting behaviors that would otherwise foster growth and independence among young kids, like allowing a school-age child to walk to school by themselves.[ii]
Beyond big choices like where to live or how to parent, mothers worry about providing for their children. There are many policies that reduce the supply of goods and services that mothers and children need, and therefore lead to rising costs for family necessities like food, housing, clothing, transportation, and childcare. Policies including tariffs, regulations, and licensing rules reduce affordability, while the value of parents’ wages is eroding due to historically high inflation.
In addition to the many policies that affect mothers generally, a variety of policies affect mothers balancing parenting with jobs outside the home. For example, parents desire flexible and remote work opportunities, but unfortunately a variety of policies make flexible or remote work difficult or impossible to secure, including federal and local regulations. For example, eighty percent of workers in the cottage food industry—which sprung up during the pandemic—are women, but home-based business restrictions in this space limit or prohibit work that makes combining work and family life easier.
Securing childcare is also a stressor for mothers, and childcare is not as affordable or accessible as it could be due to regressive regulations that limit the supply of care. Home-based business zoning also limits or bans home daycares, and this reduces both the type of childcare mothers can choose and the options for combining work and motherhood for enterprising women. Moreover, immigration restrictions, like those that surround the au pair program, reduce the availability of childcare workers.
Also complicating matters are public school schedules that are often inconsistent and unpredictable, with partial and full days off for teacher planning and other administrative holidays. These schedules can be difficult for working parents to manage with traditional work schedules.[iii]
Finally, there are burdensome policies that get in the way of would-be mothers’ involvement in adoption and foster care. For instance, educational requirements exclude would-be foster parents in places like Virginia and requirements for additional bedrooms exclude would-be mothers from adopting through foster care in prohibitively expensive locations like New York City. These requirements have little to do with the ability of a woman to parent effectively and they produce an unnecessary obstacle to placing children in homes with otherwise-qualified mothers.
It is unfortunate that these and other policies make being a mom harder, because being a mom is hard enough without government policies getting in the way. Fortunately, all of these policies could be fixed by policymakers, and they should be reformed or eliminated in order to make life easier for mothers everywhere. Making these improvements to policy would be a gift to hard working mothers for years to come.
This post is dedicated to great moms everywhere, especially Brenda, on Mother’s Day.
[i] 624,793 investigations were substantiated.
[ii] Some states like Colorado have passed legislation to narrow the definition of neglect and ensure that age appropriate independence is allowed, and other states are considering similar measures.
[iii] In a more competitive educational market, school administrators would have to compete for pupils, and schedules would be more likely to cater to mothers’ needs rather than the needs of administrators.
